This guide and my utility will assist you in cleaning up your media library AND save LOADS of space without losing any noticeable quality! This is my personal utility that I built to help with my own media file handling. My goal is to continue advancing this tool into a program that can make media management even easier!
Presently this Supports HDR10 AND HDR10+
I began this project when I was in the military as deployed members usually share movies for entertainment in the field. Many formats weren’t natively playable on phones or computers and you required special software. I wanted to uniform the ability to play the movies on all devices as well as have posters so you knew what movie you were watching. MPAA ratings (G,PG,R, etc) and dates to help members know if it was the movie they wanted to watch or not. It has since evolved to help drastically reduce bandwidth when streaming from a computer/server either in your home (via Kodi/XBMC, etc) or out to friends and family (Plex).
I’ve decided to make this project public so as to help others easily manage their media without having to stress or spend hours hopefully configuring each movie or episode or personal video files via handbrake or other utilities. These utilities also will often make changes to the audio codecs and I didn’t want to reduce audio quality any lower than it may already be. I also wanted to have a “Set it…and Forget it” mindset when it came to conversion. I had issues OFTEN with several programs that would randomly fail without error and I would have to start the manual process of tagging and queuing each individual file again. This was BORING!!!
Currently the “application” is an SFX Archive (created with WinRar) that executes a VB Script. It is rather ghetto in that fashion but it works. The script will use a few files included in the executable. FFMPEG.exe (Which I personally compile regularly with SEVERAL additions added to it so as to make it far more capable), MediaInfo.exe and mediainfo.dll (Which i do not compile), and MP4Box.exe (which I do compile alongside FFMPEG.exe). FFMPEG is what I use for converting whatever video codec that is in the media file into h265. (H265 is 1/3-2/3 the file size of h264 at the same quality). I use crf 21 (which is overkill and honestly creates slightly larger files)…but I wanted to maintain as much of the original quality as I could. I use ffmpeg to also convert incompatible audio codecs into compatible codecs.
I will provide instructions below for HOW to use utility. currently it has specific requirements that must be met. I will be creating a GUI at some point, which will obviously make this MUCH easier for configuring things yourself.